Stuart Kelly: Gaiman provides the missing link in sausage machine

Given how much I enjoyed Neil Gaiman's wonderful children's novel, The Graveyard Book, it was a treat to see him read from it at the Church Hill Theatre in Edinburgh last Tuesday – although it has to be said there were very few children and more than a few wolf-whistling sci-fi fans in the audience.

Their questions dwelt on his film career. The whole process of turning a book into a film was, he said, like putting the book through a sausage-making machine – "at best you fight to have a good tasting sausage".

Of his collaboration with Terry Gilliam, he quipped that if anyone in the audience had "$6.5m they don't want to see again" it would help; and he was pleasantly frank about Tim Burton, claiming he liked 50% of his work – "the ones where he does a story".

His advice to younger writers? Boredom is a great inspiration, so go and see some Ibsen plays, and in terms of planning, he said "knitting a parachute" was the best method.

Black backs Barack and Boris

Do publishers A&C Black know something about the US elections that the general public haven't been told? The new edition of Whitaker's Concise Almanack 2009 has a very prominent picture of Barack Obama on the cover. More frighteningly, it carries a shot of Boris Johnson as well…

Subtitle solves riddle initially

I confessed last week to being stumped by the cryptic title of Frank Kuppner's excellent new collection, Arioflotga, comprised entirely of the first lines of non-existing poems. A postcard from Frank, right, advises me to look at the subtitle again: A Revised Index Of First Lines Of The Great Anthology. The answer, as with most ingenious riddles, was there in plain sight.

What a load of bats' bollocks

The tide of Christmas titles is reaching ludicrous proportions in the office. The retro-knowledge fad shows no signs of abating, with plenty volumes subtitled "everything you learned at school but have forgotten"; the now-traditional New Scientist book of queries (Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? this year) is followed by its now traditional parody (Do Bats Have Bollocks?); and two annuals vie to be the UK equivalent of The Onion – the Daily Mash and Newsbiscuit. But for the more discerning reader there's only one gift this year: Penguin's deluxe, three volume, new translation of the entire Tales Of 1001 Nights – a snip at £150.

Here comes the cartoon bride

An online petition in Japan started by one Taichi Takashita is urging the government to change the law to allow people to marry comic book characters. "I am no longer interested in three dimensions", he confesses. "I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world. However, that seems impossible with present-day technology. Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorise marriage with a two-dimensional character?"

Now, I've always had a soft spot for Sasha Bordeaux in Checkmate. But, as any fool knows, she's in a relationship with Mr Terrific. Flora McIvor in Waverley is a fine lass, but has been fictionally dead for a good two centuries. I'd urge the Japanese government to put a stop to this, before the world as we know it collapses into a metafictional, postmodernist morass.